Re: This made me laugh

Young people today might have difficulty believing it, but this was the dominant theory for over a century - not just that adolescent girls were not interested in sex, but that females in general were uninterested. Some sectors of the Religious Right continue to assert this to this day, and I certainly recall Christian "sex education" books that made such claims, along with such claims as "9 out of 10 boys masturbate, but less than 1 out of 10 girls masturbate" and "the average adult penis is three inches long" (that's 7.5 cm). The religious right doesn't just oppose sex education, it strongly promotes sex miseducation.

Of course, it's more complicated than only that.

As you correctly note, the belief that women are asexual is not coming from the 1950s but had been there for a century. It is originally a Victorian progressive idea, and at least at its beginning it was not a particularly religious idea (remember that for both Catholics and Protestants prior to the Victorian moment, the female was a temptress; and if she wasn't capable of sexual agency it wasn't for lack of desire to have sex, but for lack of ability to keep that desire in check [*]). And of course, devoid of religious language (again) the idea now reverberates as the feminist "all sex is rape" - which implies that men have a degree, strength or breadth of sexual desire that women cannot have, dooming even prima facie consensual sex to be rape.

Now, of course, barring a relatively small number of religious fundamentalists or feminists, this idea is no longer mainstream regarding biologically adult females. It remains the mainstream regarding female children. And to a large degree, male children too.

[*] Compare the societies that practice female circumcision to minimize female sexual pleasure: there is a hidden assumption that females are not just capable, but very capable of sexual desire. If they were the Victorian asexuals they were portrayed as in most of the history of the Modern West, it would be unnecessary to minimize what was already absent.